a complete new
set of reserve aeroplanes for the Aircraft Park.

War is the only adequate training for war, and it was the necessities of
the war which revealed the needs of the Flying Corps, and gradually, by
hard-won experience, determined the best types of aeroplane and the best
kinds of armament. The enemy, driving with all his might for speedy
victory, allowed no holiday for research and manufacture. What hope was
there that the handful of officers in charge of the few centres of
military aeronautics in England would be able to meet the growing needs
of the campaign in France? The outbreak of war found this country
practically without an aeroplane engine industry. The few British firms
who understood anything about aeroplane manufacture had in time of peace
received only small experimental orders, and so were not organized for
rapid production. The situation might well be called desperate. How
could trained pilots, and machines fit to hold their own in the air, be
produced in sufficient numbers to secure for us not the mastery of the
air--that was too distant a goal--but the power to keep the air, and to
give much-needed assistance to the British army in France?

No one knows what he can do until he tries. If the situation was
desperate, it was also familiar. The English temper is at its best in
desperate situations. The little old army held the pass in France and
Flanders against enormous odds, and so procured time for the building up
of the New Army, the instrument of victory. The Royal Flying Corps, a
small body of highly trained men, kept the air in France, alongside of
the splendid French air service, while a new and greater air force was
brought to birth at home. The creation of this new force was of a piece
with that wonder of the war--the creation of the New Army. In some ways
it was the most difficult part of that great achievement. The new
infantry battalions were made largely by the imitation of a magnificent
model and the repetition of methods proved by many past successes. The
men who brought the Flying Corps to an unexpected strength had to
explore untried ways; the problems presented to them were complicated
and novel; they had no safe models to copy, and no ancient tradition to
follow. They had to cope patiently and resolutely with the most recent
of sciences, and, more than that, they had to procure and train a body
of men who should transform the timid and gradual science into a
confident and rap